The American Transference: From Calvin to Freud

BY PHILIP RIEFF

IT WAS Freud who insisted that the analyst must be a veiled figure. In that way, Freud made himself available for therapeutic purposes; the patient saw in him that character, or tangle of characters, with which he was too deeply involved. The first analyst thus became, in a guarded way, whatever the patient needed to find in him — father, mother, brother, boss, competitor, latent lover, manifest object of hatred.

Into this intimate relation between doctor and patient are marched the unemployed emotions of the patient’s life, in order that they may be sorted out and put in working order. Thus, the analyst gets to know the patient. In contrast, the patient learns to know himself through his therapeutic association with the analyst. Of the analyst he knows nothing except what he can imagine. From this imagining, and through the informed deference of his attention, the analyst learns much of what he wants to know about the patient. Yet Freud refused to realize that, in the doctor-patient relation, the therapist himself is an incalculable element, involved no less than his patient. If the two mysteries manage somehow to communicate, they accomplish that joint and greater mystery, a cure.

What the analyst can be to a patient, a doctrine may be, at times, to a culture. In both cases, the main therapeutic factor is the transference. Like patients, cultures may purge themselves of an inner conflict, caused by lingering attachments to some old doctrine, by attaching themselves to a doctrine that is new and yet closely related to the old. Thus, the Russians have not ceased to be a religious people; their Marxism makes history redemptive, instead of Christ. But the motif of redemption — for which Americans have never found a place remains. Quite without intention, Freudianism opened up a dead end in the American inner life. encouraging the replication of an old moral attitude and at the same time supplying an answer of denial. In psychoanalysis, the Puritan temper found a way to disapprove of itself.

Because it is so personal and humane a procedure. Freudian psychiatry has exhibited all the classic stigmas of a movement — splinter groups, rivalries within the leadership, secret councils, front men and Organization Men, passionate friendships turning into equally passionate hatreds. Freudian psychiatrists have had good reason to reject the notion that they are a movement. Any rending of the public veil can lead to a rending of private veils, which might endanger, or at least further complicate, the therapeutic effort. For therapeutic reasons, psychoanalysis is an esoteric discipline. As a movement, psychoanalysis necessarily sought to cover up the intense warfare of personality which, as a therapy, it sought to expose.

Unlike scientists free of the prophetic urge, Freud was not satisfied to work modestly along the lines laid down by scientific discipline; in a small company of researchers, chasing after collections of data with interpretations — and after interpretations with data. Psychoanalysis was valuable in theory, according to Freud, so far as it was successful in practice. It changed men’s minds as it cured them. Freud felt compelled by the nature of his discoveries, which men had to resist, to be the leader not merely of a movement but of an embattled one; he planned for the future of that movement in terms that can fairly be called moral — even if not in defense of established moralities. “Some larger group” was needed, he decided, than the local societies of Freudians that had sprung up to spread his theory with its practice; he wanted such a large group “working for a practical ideal.”

The size of Freud’s pedagogic ambition comes through clearly in his motives for founding the movement as an international body. This was no simple strategy to develop some licensing procedure, in order to screen entrants into the profession. Indeed, the movement was not yet so professional, and when it became so, in the famous controversy about the function of the psychoanalyst without a medical degree, Freud found himself on the losing, less professionally oriented side.

Psychoanalysis is not libertarian. As Freud conceived it, his was a genuinely neutralist movement; more precisely, a movement offering a doctrine of maturity which might free the proper student of it from the compulsion to identify with any and all movements. Despite invitations to declare himself philosophically and otherwise, Freud remained a neutralist all his life. Psychoanalysis perfectly represents the neutralism of his character.

As psychoanalysis became more adaptable, the hidden force of Freud’s character operated through the discipline, detached from his person and yet revealed in the neutral appearance that every analyst must present to his patients and, indeed, to the world. Despite periods of weakness, in which he toyed with ideas of linking his movement with others, Freud saw the dangers inherent in any such alliances. “We must in any event keep our independence. ... In the end we can come together with all the parallel sciences.” But that end appeared then, as now, far off; nor is it more clear now than it was at the time he gave this advice to one of his followers just which sciences are parallel to psychoanalysis.

AS A movement, psychoanalysis was fortunate enough to achieve a countertransference to America, that richest and yet, symbolically, most needy of all patients. To this symbolically impoverished culture, psychoanalysis brought not a new or compelling symbolism, but the next best thing: a way of analyzing symbols that is itself of symbolic (and, therefore, therapeutic) value. From being a movement, psychoanalysis became a profession, practical and immensely necessary. In America, the clinician found himself in a culture that considered itself a little crippled and broken. Freud’s was the perfect doctrine to help a culture that no longer respected itself and yet had already rejected all the earlier, established alternatives. Moreover, there was something about Protestantism itself that made it ready, upon decline, for psychoanalysis.

For Protestant culture, it was Calvin, with his doctrine of predestination, who first turned all action into symptom. Only the most careful scrutiny of the outer actions could give even a hint of the inner condition, whether that be of grace or damnation. When Freud analyzed all actions symptomatically, he appealed chiefly to persons, trained and yet troubled, in just those cultures that had once been Calvinist, or otherwise rigorously ascetic. The therapeutic of the psychological age is successor to the ascetic of the religious age, with the economic man of the age of enlightenment (and capitalism) as a merely transitional type.

Continuously, in both ascetic and therapeutic cultures, there is an inclination to see symptoms everywhere — except, of course, that the symptoms point to different sources. In the age of psychological man, God’s design and the hope of penetrating it may have vanished utterly, as, in fact, the Calvinist also discovered, often to his relief, that it had; nevertheless, there remains the passion, innominate from the decline of Calvinism to the rise of Freudianism, for acquiring some knowledge of one’s personal destiny.

To the therapeutic of the mid-twentieth century, as to the ascetic of the Reformation movements, all destinies had become intensely personal and not at all communal. The way to this selfknowledge, which may be in itself saving, is to trace back a person’s conduct from symptom to the inner conditions responsible for that symptom. In the religious period, the symptom was called sin, and the neurotic, a sinner, sell-convicted. The task of the clergy was to make the sinner hopefully aware of his sin; the task of the analyst is to make the neurotic therapeutically aware of his neurosis.

Residues of the old attribution of sin cling to the modern and popular usage of the term “neurotic.” Like his predecessor, the sinner, the neurotic is most reluctant to admit his weakness. In fact, this failure to admit a fundamental weakness is the most obvious characteristic of the inner wrong which the sinner-neurotic commits against himself. Such failure was once called pride. The thankless task of old ministers and new psychoanalysts consists first in educating for that state of awareness from which a person can cope with his weakness.

A detailed admission of weakness is the beginning of emotional (or spiritual) strength, in both the ascetic and therapeutic traditions. It is not a condition easily admitted, for the weak one may consider himself strong, and only others, near him, may have to bear the burden of his weakness. In this sense, a family may be dominated by its weakest member, who, to the unanalytic eye, may appear strongest merely because he is the most aggressive or has succeeded otherwise in building his neurosis into his character.

In the culture to which psychological man is heir, there has been an acute sense of the weakness of human character but a diminished capacity to feel compassion for it. As the religious mitigations of weakness, built into the ascetic tradition, withered away, all that remained was a test of strength

— successful action in the conduct of life. These mitigations, or devices of release from the tension of trying to be good or successful, remained operative in Catholic cultures. In consequence, psychoanalytic therapy never found as ready and receptive a public in those areas of Western culture that remained Catholic, or nonascetic.

Meanwhile, in those parts of the ascetic West that had lost their religious impetus, the contempt for weakness, inherent anyway in Calvinist doctrine, grew steadily more powerful. The individual, caught in this hard, dying culture, tried to hide his sense of weakness, for he no longer felt a compelling explanation for it; nor could he use something in his system of worship to escape this now intensely personal fault (no longer attributable to divine decision). The culture, always guilt-ridden, was no longer guilt-releasing. Without the remedy of grace or good works, conscience became the seat of emotional weakness rather than the sign of moral strength.

for Freud, strength was the rare bonus, weakness the common return on experience. By indicating again the universality of weakness — and, moreover, by suggesting new remedies for it — Freud challenged the tough indifference of the old ascetic attitude, while, at the same time, strengthening individuals to continue living in what remains a culture dominated by goals set in the ascetic period. In his determination to help an individual function more adequately in a situation essentially competitive from the cradle to the grave, Freud tempered the rivalrous mood of contemporary social life without challenging its validity. He thought thus to teach man how to snatch some personal success in living out of the general failure.

As a way of transforming the ascetic temper, now crabbed and mainly negative, psychoanalysis is no empty cipher, no shadow of religious doctrine. On the contrary, it is a doctrine suitable to this postreligious age. Even the goals of ascetic effort are disappearing in an economy based on leisure. If the former ascetic is to continue to work hard and live well, he must do so without any aim in mind other than the therapy of action which is living itself. The work of the ascetic must become the play of the therapeutic; that is the moral economy about which spokesmen of the new type, such as David Riesman, are theorizing.

As Freud saw him, psychological man had to learn how to accept life as if it were a game, earnestly played, with each player aware that in the beginning he is so unpracticed that the game must remain a series of errors and penalties. Yet, learning finally to be a strategist on his own behalf, psychological man could meet demands upon his energy and character quite as rigorous as those made during a time when he had a God on his side and the comfort of natural law instead of mere laws of nature.

There is something old-fashioned about the psychoanalytic movement; it is, in fact, although more subtly than ever before, a movement of selfhelp. For all the analyst can do is teach another how to become his own therapist, strong in the knowledge of his particular weakness. Freud insisted on this modesty of purpose, which many critics have viewed as an unwarranted pessimism. But the alternative to Freud’s modesty is the optimism of a fresh religious sense of personal service to some object other than the self. Such therapies seemed to Freud to exploit the very weaknesses from which men suffered and for which they sought therapy in the first place. Doctrines of salvation are always therapeutic. In a culture no longer capable of inventing such doctrines. Freud proposed a therapy that did not try to charm the suffering out of humanity but only restored the capacity to endure living. For those no longer childlike enough to be charmed, a restoration of capacity is the one gift necessary and prior to any small giving of themselves.

I must emphasize that Freud condemned the religious repressions for instrumental reasons, because they were failing. Because religion could no longer compel character but only distract it, Freud dared suggest, in the name of science, a new ethical straightforwardness. Faith had become another form of anxiety. Despite his occasional protests about its neutrality and limited purposes, Freud hoped his own science would contribute in a major way to the working out of a more controllable and rational alternative to those imaginative systems of increasing anxiety that we call “religion.”